Too much life we discard In everything we abandon Empty cigarette packet Looking askance from the dump As if missing all tobacco and smoke Few sensual tomatoes With rotten yellow bottoms Smelling of love dulled by time And punctured by doubts Few broken brushes That tired licking a canvas’ face And caressing all those curves Rolled up pizza-restaurant advertisements Where one spends more on manners And comes away empty like summer evening A broken cup Hurled at the wall opposite in frustration And regretted over later For it cupped tea in all rainy nights of winter And turned into a silent friend Few wet pages of a local newspaper That screams loud of corruption and deaths But wanders nowhere near truth Beside lies a young kitten Only few days back It climbed up and down stairs But now dead probably out of hunger The only constant which echoes through history But very few hear it A tiny bag of coffee beans That missed dying in milked water And emanate those reddish blue romantic scents Like bundles of affection That one stores deep within one’s heart For the one who is coming but not reached yet. Or wasted, inspired thoughts That one resists turning into poems By leaving them long in the brain-furnace And they wane away like steam Rather than ferment like yogurt. Several shreds of a broken mirror Reflective of human soul Shattered by millennial past Of shame and horror And a disordered clock With its pendulum lying by its side As if time has forgotten Oscillating between binaries Of night and day; evil and good But has strayed into a subliminal desert Where nothing moves. Not only animals and people But objects die too More sadly For who mourn them? The writer is a student of English Literature at Government College University, Lahore and can be reached at rosseautolstoy5@gmail.com Published in Daily Times, November 13th 2017.